For avid gamers who clock major hours in virtual worlds, getting the opportunity to see the nitty-gritty behind-the-scenes work that goes into making these intense interactive experiences is a rare treat. Pulling back the curtain on the inner workings of the game development world, veteran game journalist Geoff Keighley digs deep into the Tomb Raider franchise and unearths some fascinating stories in The Final Hours of Tomb Raider, a multimedia app for iPad.

Former National Football League linebacker Hunter Hillenmeyer witnessed the attachment of professional athletes to video games during his playing days, and now he's the president and co-founder of OverDog, a startup that aims to connect star players and their fans by letting them play online games togehter, all via an iOS app.

Set to launch to the public later this year, OverDog today launched a Kickstarter campaign that will help fund the endeavor while also allowing eager fans to take part in a closed beta period this April. We recently spoke with Hillenmeyer and OverDog co-founder and president Steve Berneman to learn about the service and how they plan to deliver unique and streamlined off-the-field player interactions.

Love the new and improved user interface on the web-based Hulu? If you have a PlayStation 3, you can now get the same great look -- and the company promises to keep rolling it out to other living room devices as well.

The E3 show kicks off Tuesday in Los Angeles, but game companies are already hard at work pushing their wares ahead of the big kick-off. Among them is Valve, who has announced a new chapter in the Counter-Strike saga coming later this summer.

The heavens parted for Android users today, and Instagram was delivered unto them. The news seems to have stirred up hateful emotions for some of the Google faithful who shun fraternizing with the more than 30 million iOS users already sharing photos with the service, but you can’t please everyone, right? Meanwhile, there are plenty of other tech-related stories for this fine day, so let’s launch right into all the news for Tuesday, April 3, 2012.

We love us some Plex here at MacLife.com, where we’ve converted an aging Mac mini into a fine home theatre server with a minimum of effort. Now that recent versions of the Plex application have separated the server software from the client software, all sorts of goodies have been coming -- such as DLNA streaming support with a new server update this week.

Growing up, your toys were cool and you were glad you had them, but your friends always had a cooler toy that you would have killed for. Valve, creators of best-selling game franchises such as Half-Life, Counter-Strike and the Steam online store, appear to have realized this and announced on Tuesday that the the PlayStation 3 version of Portal 2 will include cross platform play capable of communicating with the Mac OS X and Windows versions for multiplayer games, persistent cloud-based storage of saved games, and cross platform chat.